Weekly Billing

[iTylerNAllen]

I would not mind seeing a weekly billing timeset, however, I also would not mind seeing an hourly or even daily billing. I see a lot of web designers use WHMCS and a few designers charge per hour, so I think that something like this would enable designers to be able to bill their customers with a system as powerful as WHMCS.

Fruit for thought.

[othellotech]

Extending the billing cycles to include daily and weekly and "n" day cycles would be fantastic - maybe someone should post a poll ?

[Matt]

How are you guys wanting the daily and weekly cycles to work exactly? Just a regular fixed amount?

We can obviously do that, but when billing gets down to being as fine as daily, or even weekly, in our experience that is mostly some kind of usage based billing, and so that requires usage data, and that means usually hooking up to some kind of third party system and using an API. And that's already possible, always has been, and we have lots of users we've worked with and advised on working with the WHMCS API's for daily, weekly, even hourly billing, but there's no need for any cycle in products for it.

Similarly if you're a web designer charging by the hour, a product that recurs every hour doesn't really make sense? You would just keep track of the time you spend (which as it happens, our project management addon is nearing completion which will be able to track time) and then invoice for it all in one go either as a custom invoice or as a product.

So what we need are some real world examples here - what exactly is it you're trying to achieve with these short cycles? If we can understand that, we'll be able to let you know what we can do.

Matt

[othellotech]

Subscriptions are the obvious "product" for odd billing cycles - either recurring (until cancelled or for N periods) or one-off (auto-cancel)

Think wireless access at your hotel - available for 1 day at X or 3 days at Y or 7 days at Z as a "single" purchase, or weekly membership (auto-renew-until cancel) to a networking group which charges your card every Monday ...

[pbnet]

I'll also chime in and say that options other than existing (monthly, annually, etc) should be added. The fact is, there are many different needs for whmcs clients.

I agree with matt that hourly should be handled as a total at the end of a period or service.

But, the fact that whmcs is fixed with monthly, etc... and is very limiting. I would love the option to bill weekly. As we know, this option is available in many subscription products both online and offline.

Why not at least add a custom period option in whmcs to accommodate custom period needs?

Every X Days | Monthly | Quarterly | Semi-Annually | Annually | Biennially | Triennially

Otherwise, current options assumes and forces a one size fits all, when in fact it doesn't.

[pbnet]

EDIT: I would also like to say that I do have actual experience in working with different billing cycles and some work better than others, depending on the product or service.

Also, hourly as some may have suggested could also introduce system resource issues.

At minimum, X day cycles.

[Seedboxfarm]

i agree, weekly billing should have been a default like monthly.

I sell seedboxes and 70% of my clients ask for weekly subscriptions.
Also this is a good option to avoid us having to setup trial accounts, a small seedbox for 3 euro's would be okay by most clients.

So please, offer this for us, we actually loose clients to xirvik who does provide weekly billing.
Now what i do is add and add on they can select so the price drops a few bucks.
But that means we need to keep track of that manually, and that is not done with 400+ clients....

[disgruntled]

A real time example.... sort of

Option to set the frequency billed, instead of a billing date each month,

The anniversary date is the date to be used. We set a client to be billed every 4 weeks, (great for standing order clients). or if they prefer, they can split the cost of a package over the 4week period, so a £100 per 4 week package could be paid in regular weekly small installments.

The monthly billing is a bit inflexible.

Imagine the amount of clients we could bring in if we said, you can pay us weekly for your server mammoth server (car companies sell a car with £xx.xx per week) why cant we. (maybe this just gets credited and then the billing takes the credit on due date).


As far as invoice creation/notices, we need to have set up more options here. i suggest billing groups. These groups will each have their own settings. So we say

Annual, biannual, quartely, 30 day notice, 15day notice 7day creation

Monthly, 10 day notice, 5 day creation

weekly, no notice, 1day creation

Weekly wouldn't need more time, or any notices, they know its coming and don't have time to forget, where as monthly is easy to just slip the mind, and as for quarterly and longer,

several times i have has the same thing, "i cant pay just yet, can i have more time" and due to the way they get notified i can only say yes,

where as, if they have had plenty of notice even 2 - 3 months notice on very large accounts (biennial, triennial) then it would eliminate many of the "can i have time" requests.

[disgruntled]

Why not at least add a custom period option in whmcs to accommodate custom period needs?

Just my two pence on this, the daily cron run.. cant you add in an option to check the clients billing frequency, it already checks and updates their usage,

I think an option in the billing frequency page (client custom billing) on or off. (checked at cron run)

if its on,
New tab in client account, with their frequency info (manually set by the admin on request otherwise the system default is used).

if its off
the system just proceeds exactly as it does now.


This could be a feasible solution, ofcourse it means rewriting the current system for it, but i dont think it would be a massive inconvenience

[Strother]

I support the idea of a weekly and every-other-week billing option, but can't see the purpose for dogging Matt while asking for an improvement.

Matt and his team are far from lazy.